Sales Process
Whether you know it or not, there is a process that you are putting your prospects through in order to buy your product or service. Is it defined?
A sales process is a pre-defined series of steps that you follow as you guide your prospects from their initial contact through to their purchase of your products or services. The sales process should be defined from the point where you first identify a new prospect. The sales process is also known as your sales funnel.
If you refine your sales process you can shorten the selling cycle, understand the educational requirements your prospect has in order to make an informed buying decision, ensure that you convey your competitive advantage, better track conversions through your sales funnel, and the length of time it takes a prospect to move from stage to stage.
Here’s a short list of the benefits a defined and coordinated sales process gives you:
- Sell your products and services more efficiently by focusing on your competitive advantage
- Understand the potential revenue and return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns, then use the data to estimate what is needed to go into the top of your funnel in order to get what you want out of the bottom of your funnel
- Understand the sales funnel, which stages take the most time for your prospects to move through, then find ways to move them to the next stage
- Create better, more purposeful literature and tools geared toward moving your prospects from one stage to the next through your sales funnel
- Improve your campaigns by understanding how you feed prospects into the top of the funnel
- Minimize the amount of time your sales reps have to spend on educating clients. This improves morale and high morale improves close rates.
One of the major benefits of a sales process is that it allows you to see where prospects fall out of the process. Knowing this, we can help you find ways to bring these prospects back into your funnel.
We will work with you to understand what you need from a customer, where they need to be before your sales reps invest time in them, and what the customer needs from you in order to feel like they would be making a huge mistake buying from anyone else but you.
It’s important to know if a single decision maker buys your product on the spot, or if they go through many steps and approvals first. You may need to provide education to the customer, or if there are multiple departments involved in the decision, you may have to work to provide each of them with the materials that will satisfy their needs.
If you don’t have a defined sales process, what are you waiting for? It’s a valuable tool that improves your entire sales and marketing program because it gets everyone on the same page and it gives sales people what they need: Customers, with cash in hand who are ready to buy.
Don’t misunderstand, we are not going to turn your sales reps into order takers; sales skills are a valuable asset to every organization. Rather, we are going to minimize the time your sales reps have to spend qualifying and educating your prospects. We are going to eliminate all of the cold leads and “tire kickers.” This will free your sales reps up to actually make sales. The actual sale is vital to your business. Let the sales people focus on closing. When their close ratios go up, they will feel like they are unstoppable and their close ratios will go up even further.
A sales process is a powerful tool! If you are serious about your success, call us!
